About the Retreat - Taking the Backward Step Mind is usually taken to mean all kinds of mental activity, but what we’re interested in here is ‘mind itself’ – the […]

The Buddha taught the divine abodes – unconditional love, compassion, joy and equanimity – not just as states of calm, but as ways to liberate the mind. The Brahmavihara practices […]

Bodhicitta – the awakening heart – is both the heart–response of wisdom to the suffering of living beings everywhere and the urge to realise full awakening for the benefit of […]

  Accessing dhyana (jhana), or absorption, seems to be very natural for some people, and a complete mystery to others. Dhyana is well worth cultivating as a way of deepening […]

  The Satipatthana Sutta, one of the most influential of the Buddha’s discourses, shows how wakeful, insightful attention to body, feelings and mind can enable us to wake up to […]

  The Heart Sutra is one of the most well-known and loved of all Buddhist texts. Inevitably, there are innumerable takes on what it ‘means’. Early western commentators treated it […]

“Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states… one suffuses, fills, and permeates one’s entire body with rapture and pleasure born of seclusion, so that there is no part […]

  Our ‘precious human body’ is the first and most important foundation not just of mindfulness, but of meditation and Dharma practice as a whole. The teaching of the Buddha’s […]